With regard to general aesthetic education, the university liberal studies curriculum is designed to provide a balance of the humanities and sciences. Beyond offering a balanced curriculum, there is the current trend for universities to offer a liberal studies curriculum that interfaces the sciences and the humanities. A prime example of this is…

Painting on silk has a magic all its own. Versions of painting on silk can be found throughout the world from Japan and Europe to the United States. Themes for the paintings can be most any type of design or imagery. Applying the liquid dyes is exciting, as the vivid liquid colors flow and blend into the fabric. The process captures students'…

Art teachers often get stuck teaching students about "classical" artists who lived over 500 years ago. As art enthusiasts, teachers may be very interested in their importance, but children might be wondering why they have to learn about yet another dead artist. In this article, the author describes how her eighth-grade art students created their…

Every year, the author's eighth-graders do some projects on color mixing and color schemes. In this article, the author gives a twist to the basic color wheel. Using rough-draft paper the same size as the paper they would eventually work on, students were to figure out a way to divide it into six spaces. They were not limited to basic rectangles,…

Vocabulary can become tedious and a chore if it is approached as such. By making art terms and vocabulary meaningful, students will remember and use them for years to come. In this article, the author describes two vocabulary review projects that work wonderfully and create great works of art: (1) cursive creature rubbings; and (2) bubbling bodies…

When the author asks her students to illustrate different types of weather, invariably their paintings look like nonobjective artwork: Winter often becomes one snowman with hundreds of asterisk snowflakes scattered throughout the picture. Spring? A rainbow with smiley-faced suns. So, in what direction could the author lead her students that would…

Incorporating the arts into the classroom through the study of poetry and writing can improve literacy with the connection to the lyrical movement of dance, music, and art. Through the arts, teachers can guide students in exploring figurative language, tone, rhythm, and imagery as it pertains to the arts and its relationship to the voice and…

Using student work as exemplars is a powerful component of a balanced pedagogy. Not only does it help students design reachable learning goals, but it also stimulates students in their studies through collaborative teaching and learning. No matter how good an individual teaching artist is in his or her own art, it does not mean that he or she is…

Responding to the literature on positive adaptability, we investigated caring relationships as they manifest as protective processes in the Visual Arts classroom. Caring relationships between teachers and their students have been isolated as one of three protective factors which help promote resilience and thus positive adaptability. The Visual…

This paper explores how aligned arts and play experiences can extend child and family engagement in a public outdoor space. The importance of outdoor play for children is strongly advocated and in response local governments provide playgrounds and recreational open spaces. To extend further the experiences afforded in such spaces some local…

Targeting students in grades K-8, Art in Action's program consists of 12 age-appropriate lessons per year led by parent and teacher volunteers. The curriculum is based on historically significant artists and their works of art. Through semi-structured discussions, students examine a variety of masterpieces, learning about the artist as well as…

Creative classroom constructions imbued with arts integration, a transmediational multimodal pedagogy, are examined in exploratory action research in three bilingual elementary classroom learning experiences. In each of the lessons, there was a whole-group introduction and small-group hands-on arts-based activities inclusive of peer dialoguing,…

The greatest numbers of young people in New Zealand are from Pasifika peoples' ethnic groups. In contrast, art teachers in secondary schools are predominantly European. Research conducted in 2015, which investigated how art teachers are responding to the increasing diversity of students, uncovered important insights. This article provides…

This qualitative study explores how a community of enquiry pedagogy in combination with a social semiotic approach to visual analysis influenced the changing knowledge and concepts of knowledge experienced by students in an undergraduate teacher education course. The art of the Constitutional Court of South Africa was the focus of our study and…

Interior design is seldom integrated within the general art education curriculum because the subject matter is generally segregated as a commercial art. However, the importance of interior design concepts of sustainability in art education can really help a student understand the scale and proportion of space and mass, and how sustainability is…